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Salary: USD 190,900 - 334,100 / annual
ServiceNow's Industry Vertical Engineering team is seeking a Senior Staff Applications Development Engineer to design and build AI-native enterprise applications tailored to specific industry verticals including high-tech, telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing.
In this role, you will architect and deliver scalable, AI-native applications whose core behavior is model-driven rather than explicitly authored. You will work across the full software development lifecycle, often embedded directly with customers as a forward-deployed engineer. Your responsibilities include:
• Design, build, and deliver AI-native enterprise applications with industry-specific workflows, data models, and compliance requirements, including production integrations and channels.
• Build agentic behavior into applications: intent interpretation, multi-step reasoning, tool invocation, and autonomous action through conversational experiences (chat and voice) with context management and human handoff.
• Design AI-driven autonomous workflows by decomposing business processes into executable steps, determining appropriate autonomy levels, and defining exception handling and human checkpoints.
• Author and maintain agentic instructions (system prompts, role definitions, tool descriptions, guardrails, escalation rules) as versioned engineering artifacts with review and regression coverage.
• Engineer prompts for reliability through task decomposition, golden examples, structured output schemas, grounding, citation, graceful failure handling, and cost optimization.
• Build automated evaluation and testing frameworks for non-deterministic behavior: golden datasets, multi-turn conversation suites, model-as-judge scoring, CI gates, drift detection, and adversarial testing.
• Design configurable, extensible software that customers can customize without sacrificing performance or maintainability. Write clean, reusable, well-tested code following engineering best practices.
• Specify requirements precisely and direct AI coding agents: convert requirements into testable specifications with explicit scope and constraints, decompose work into agent-sized tasks, and own the results.
• Deliver as a forward-deployed engineer embedded with customers: build against their data and integrations, tune instructions in their environment, and return with evidence that improves the product.
• Own quality, safety, and reliability in production: monitor conversation quality, containment, hallucination, and unsafe actions; defend against prompt injection and data leakage; troubleshoot performance and scalability across distributed systems.
• Serve as a technical leader: mentor engineers, promote knowledge sharing, drive engineering best practices, and lead complex technical initiatives spanning multiple teams while influencing architecture and platform direction.
• Partner with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into scalable technical solutions.
Requirements:
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience in the SaaS industry, building and operating products at production scale.
• Demonstrated track record of building, shipping, and operating production software, including hands-on delivery of AI-native application features that real users depend on.
• Direct, hands-on experience authoring agentic instructions and prompts, designing AI-driven autonomous workflows, and building evaluation and testing for non-deterministic behavior.
• Advanced command of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, system design, APIs, and performance optimization.
• Strong grounding in modern application architecture across cloud, distributed systems, and service-oriented or platform technologies, with solid data modeling and storage fundamentals.
• AI-native application development: agent orchestration, tool and function calling, context assembly, grounding against enterprise data, and handling latency, cost, and failure.
• Prompt engineering and evaluation of non-deterministic systems: intent-driven prompt design plus measurable frameworks for response quality, agent behavior, tool-selection accuracy, and regression risk.
• Specification precision and architectural judgment: ability to define problems rigorously and decide when to solve in code, instructions, or by delegating to an agent.
• Working knowledge of safety, security, and data handling for AI-integrated applications: prompt injection, sensitive-data leakage, over-broad tool access, and unsafe autonomous action.
• Willingness to work directly with customers in a forward-deployed capacity with judgment and credibility to communicate capability, limitation, and risk.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex projects across multiple teams as a technical owner or engineering leader, with strong communication, collaboration, and mentoring skills.
• Experience integrating AI into engineering workflows, decision-making, automation, or the software development process itself.
• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving.
Preferred Qualifications:
• ServiceNow platform experience, including building configurable, extensible applications.
• Deep domain experience in high-tech and familiarity with regulated industries (telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing) at depth sufficient to challenge requirements.
• Experience delivering conversational experiences in chat, voice, or both, including turn and context management, disambiguation, and automated-to-human handoff.
• Prior forward-deployed, solution engineering, or professional services experience.
• Familiarity with modern UI frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) and evaluation, tracing, and prompt management tooling for LLM applications.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years with Java or similar OO language.
• Passion for JavaScript and the Web as a platform, reusability, and componentization.
• Advanced knowledge of relational databases including development, troubleshooting, and performance optimization.
• Experience with multiple technology stacks: Cloud Dev, Platforms, Web Dev, Frameworks, or service-oriented architecture.
